Perspectives on painting
I am interested in the representation of memory, identity and agency. Some works revisit relatively recent events, such as the 2005 shooting of the Brazilian migrant worker, Jean Charles de Menezes, or London's urban unrest of 1985 – both of which occured in my neighbourhood.

Other projects resurrect more distant times and places such as the English Tudor sailor Sir John Hawkins, or Angola's 17th-century queen Njinga. And again, in both instances, these figures resonate with my upbringing in the English westcountry and southern Africa.

So, in seeking new forms and perspectives, my studio process inevitably navigates intimate networks of family, community and work.

K Donkor, 2012

Selected online texts - for a full bibliography, click 'biography':

'Hawkins & Co' (Liverpool) online review
Sandra Gibson, Nerve, 2008

'Hawkins & Co (London)' online review
Sara Allen, Culture 24, 2007

'Telltale' online review
Kate Smith, Culture 24, 2006

'Caribbean Passion: Haiti 1804' online review
Kamali Melbourne, BBC Nottingham, 2005

'Art... in a time of Terror' online comment
Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy, ArtsHub, 2005

'Police try to censor exhibition' online comment
Art Knowledge News, 2005

"… a painter [such as Asele] is almost certainly conscious of the inherent multivalence in the nature of the image, almost always aware of the image's capacity to speak simultaneously to both the sacred and the seemingly profane, to appear decorative without losing its vehicular agency."

© Olu Oguibe, 'The Culture Game', 2004